Old Enough to Drink and Superdraft - MLS 2017

"Like Seinfeld, one of the cardinal rules of MLS is there is no learning, no lessons, no moral of the story. MLS is a TV show where nothing happens." Heh. I refer the jury to this piece I wrote on this very site almost nine years ago.

Old Enough to Drink and Superdraft - MLS 2017

That was a nice piece, imp, but unrelated to that...when did Paste magazine turn from a music magazine into a website that has a soccer column and regularly has some pretty good political writing? It was a strange transformation I only notice after it happened.

I think the lack of identifying team characteristics is made exponentially worse by the constant expansion. Casual American fans of the Premier League know the big teams, but then the clubs like West Brom, Stoke, Crystal Palace, etc. all sort of blend together into a gray mass. MLS seems to want to keep growing into one giant gray mass. I guess the approach is to cover the country until each region has its own team that they can follow. I have no fucking clue about Atlanta except that they sold a lot of season tickets and that Martino is their coach. Minnesota? I'm still not clear if it's a new team, or if it's the same club from the USL (or was it the NASL?), I have no clue what their uniforms look like, and I sure as hell don't know who plays for them. I don't have time to pay attention to MLS closely each week, so a lot of the league is now a mystery to me, but 10 years ago it was a lot easier to have a sense that you knew what was going on in the league even though there was far less media coverage.

Old Enough to Drink and Superdraft - MLS 2017

Yes, it's the NASL team that came up, Inca. They're up to 30k tickets sold for their home opener Saturday.

In other opening weekend news, Kaka pulled a hamstring and is out for a month or two, an NYCFC fan tried to steal a brand new purple seat from Orlando's stadium, another one also got arrested for trying to choke an Orlando cop, and some of Atlanta's fans busted out the puto chant.

Don Garber teased an announcement of broadcasting games on social media.

Gold Cup group draw was today. USA gets Panama, Martinique, and the Haiti-Nicaragua winner. The others are Honduras, Costa Rica, Canada, and French Guyana; and Mexico, El Salvador, Jamaica, and Curacao.

Ex-Colorodo forward Deshorn Brown reappears, at Tampa Bay Rowdies.

Fresno might be in USL in 2018, in addition to all the other rumored teams.

Meanwhile, the WNT performed the most magnificent act of selfdefecation I have seen in a long, long time tonight at RFK.

Old Enough to Drink and Superdraft - MLS 2017

Incandenza wrote: That was a nice piece, imp, but unrelated to that...when did Paste magazine turn from a music magazine into a website that has a soccer column and regularly has some pretty good political writing? It was a strange transformation I only notice after it happened.

I think the lack of identifying team characteristics is made exponentially worse by the constant expansion. Casual American fans of the Premier League know the big teams, but then the clubs like West Brom, Stoke, Crystal Palace, etc. all sort of blend together into a gray mass. MLS seems to want to keep growing into one giant gray mass. I guess the approach is to cover the country until each region has its own team that they can follow. I have no fucking clue about Atlanta except that they sold a lot of season tickets and that Martino is their coach. Minnesota? I'm still not clear if it's a new team, or if it's the same club from the USL (or was it the NASL?), I have no clue what their uniforms look like, and I sure as hell don't know who plays for them. I don't have time to pay attention to MLS closely each week, so a lot of the league is now a mystery to me, but 10 years ago it was a lot easier to have a sense that you knew what was going on in the league even though there was far less media coverage.

That's true of all American sports, though. So many teams. Always a few good ones, a few really bad ones, and a big mass in the middle.

College sports can be easier or harder on that front. If you try to follow an entire sport nationwide, it's hard to keep track, but if you just pay attention to one conference, it's possible to get to know the teams.

Minnesota have the best crest. Their old NASL jerseys where the loon took up half the shirt were better, but the new ones are ok.
http://www.mlsstore.com/Minnesota_United_FC_Gear/source/BM-mlscom-MNUFC-TopNav-010617

Old Enough to Drink and Superdraft - MLS 2017

Incandenza wrote: That was a nice piece, imp, but unrelated to that...when did Paste magazine turn from a music magazine into a website that has a soccer column and regularly has some pretty good political writing? It was a strange transformation I only notice after it happened.

They're also returning as a print quarterly with a vinyl LP each issue. Not sure how that will turn out - they introduced me to a lot of great music in the early 00s, but then I got a little fed up with the tone of the magazine around the time they stopped printing it, and half the bands on the CDs started sounding like Americana-by-numbers. The initial online version was terrible, so I gave up looking at it years ago.

Old Enough to Drink and Superdraft - MLS 2017

Anton Gramscescu wrote:

Originally Posted by jefe

Also, the CCL has been destroyed and rebuilt into two separate halves. Every fall, there's going to be a 16 team knockout between the runnerup and losing finalists from the Caribbean championship, and 13 teams from Central America-the odd one being from Belize, two from everyone else.

The winner of that gets to play in the varsity tournament in the spring, joining the Caribbean championship winner, the 4 American, 4 Mexican, and 1 Canadian teams, and the champions of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama.

Which means if you were an MLS team which qualified for CL in summer 2016 you do not get to play until Feb 2018. Which is batshit crazy.

Canadian championship this year kicks off in a month, with TFC playing the Edmonton-Ottawa winner and Montreal v Vancouver. If TFC *doesn't* win this year's as holders, they play this year's winner at home on August 9 to determine the Canadian team for the 2018 CCL.

Next year, the Canadian championship expands to include the winners of League 1 Ontario and Quebec.

Landon has joined the San Diego expansion ownership group, who are also running a name the team contest-50 possibilities to choose from. Options include Footy McFootyface, San Diego Classy, San Diego Burgundy, Mission San Diego, and San Diego Chargers, among so many more.

Old Enough to Drink and Superdraft - MLS 2017

From the Paste article

This may be part of the reason why Toronto FC seems to have had a little trouble finding things to fill in their new ‘Wall of Honour.’ They’ve included, for instance, the 1976 NASL Soccer Bowl winners Metros-Croatia, despite the fact the teams have no connection whatsoever beyond existing in the same city and playing the same sport.

This belies a very Euro-centric attitude. In North America, because of the franchise system, and a few other reasons, fans loyalties are more about teh city than the club, per se. We're not, usually, naive enough to think that the team is really "our club" (except the Packers, maybe and a few minor league operations). Players come and go. Owners come and go and can't be relied upon to give a fuck about the fans. Leagues expand and realign. Stadiums come and go. In the worst case, a team leaves and another comes later with a different name. But the city, it's fan base for a particular sport, and the fan culture can endure (see Baltimore Colts/Ravens).

So "existing in the same city and playing the same sport," especially when that sport is one that many here believe has no history here at all, is what matters. It's especially important to respect that history in soccer, because so many fans and potential fans imagine that the game has no history here at all.

Old Enough to Drink and Superdraft - MLS 2017

You have (I think the original case was the San Francisco Giants celebrating the New York Giants' triumphs), and I continue not to agree.

If there is any continuity in such cases, I think it rests with the club, not the city/sport, absent genuine reclamation of the earlier team's identity, as in the cases of the Cleveland Browns or Winnipeg Jets. I'm also ok with MLB teams celebrating the history of Negro League clubs that played in that city, but no one sees that as claiming those clubs' identity.

Old Enough to Drink and Superdraft - MLS 2017

My experience trying to push my NASL book was quite the opposite - I spent months contacting teams in ex- and current-NASL cities all over North America with a view to readings/signings etc., all the while pushing the book as historical evidence showing that soccer in North America, and in their individual cities, does have a legitimate tradition, albeit an unusual one.

Old Enough to Drink and Superdraft - MLS 2017

I would argue that New York baseball is a bit of an outlier.

[ul]

[li]They couldn't suddenly become Yankees fans after hating them all that time and accepting the Mets, as many of them did away, would mean tacitly supporting all that Robert Moses bullshit that led to Shea Stadium, etc.
But that's not usually how it is when a team moves. Usually when a team leaves, it doesn't leave any team at the same level behind in the same city. The fans just have to wait for another team to come.[/li]

[li]The "club" isn't really a thing. They are franchises. They belong to the owners. Every other part comes and goes pretty much at the discretion of owners. Recall that the Giants were inches from moving to St. Petersburg. However, it feels more like a traditional club in the cities with more than one team, because people feel like they've made a choice of team independent of their connection to the city. That's not true in most places.[/li]

[li]The SF Giants played games in New York with players that had been NY Giants, and in those days players didn't move around as much. So they had a chance to see players they liked and knew play again in NY very soon after they left. The Nats never played again in Montreal. The Colts didn't come back to Baltimore as a road team. (A few ex-Browns may have been on the Ravens when they played again in Cleveland, but I'm not sure).[/li]

[li]New Yorkers have no reason to be concerned that any part of their sporting history will be forgotten. That's not true of a smaller city let alone a minor league town like Jamestown New York, etc. [/li]

[li]Other than the name and the colors, the SF Giants have no enduring connection to the NY Giants any more than the Orioles have with the St Louis Browns[/li]

[li]The Twins are more likely to honor the Millers and the old Saints than the old Senators, which is sensible. The A's have worn Oakland Oaks throwbacks. I don't know if they've ever worn blue Philadelphia A's throwbacks. [/li]

[li]Preserving and promoting the history of soccer in Canada and the US is especially important. We no longer even have a hall of fame. There's a widespread perception that the game is "new" here or "foreign."[/li]

[li]Metros Croatia, or Toronto Croatia, still exist. That's not true of a lot of North American teams of years gone by. The entity that can promote their history are the current professional teams in those cities.
[/ul]

Old Enough to Drink and Superdraft - MLS 2017

ursus arctos wrote: And yet the current Cosmos still do resonate with some people who remember the glory years.

The current Cosmos were all offended that I called NASL Mk 2 "semi-pro" at the end of the book. Followed by a sniffy note that they were "all booked up" for the year. But at least they bothered to respond.

Old Enough to Drink and Superdraft - MLS 2017

imp wrote: My experience trying to push my NASL book was quite the opposite - I spent months contacting teams in ex- and current-NASL cities all over North America with a view to readings/signings etc., all the while pushing the book as historical evidence showing that soccer in North America, and in their individual cities, does have a legitimate tradition, albeit an unusual one.

Amount of interest shown? Absolutely none whatsoever. Everywhere.

All the more reason for MLS clubs to push it! People need to be told what to think sometimes. But most of them are too lazy for books, I suppose. If you were promoting a film, it probably would have gone a bit better.

Tampa Bay had to go to a lot of effort and cost to regain the Rowdies name and their fans insisted on it. And of course Portland, Vancouver, and Seattle kept their old names and that whole Cosmos thing. So there's obviously some nostalgia for the old names and colors, at least. Not enough to actually read a book, I guess.

Old Enough to Drink and Superdraft - MLS 2017

Assuming many people actually knew about the book - the paralytic marketing efforts of my publisher combined with the utter lack of club interest meant, and still means, that most fans have, I reckon, no clue that the book even exists.

Old Enough to Drink and Superdraft - MLS 2017

I've never really understood why Reed feels so strongly about this question. It strikes me as very much for which there is no "correct" answer.

Because I feel that fans loyalty to the franchises should never be greater than the franchise's loyalty to them. It's one of the few communitarian protests against naked capitalist greed still available to us.

And it's also just pragmatic. It's way more rewarding to support a local team - even a crappy lower league one - that you can watch live and see in the grocery story, than one that's based the other side of the continent. Fans would be happier if they could see that.

Old Enough to Drink and Superdraft - MLS 2017

imp wrote: Assuming many people actually knew about the book - the paralytic marketing efforts of my publisher combined with the utter lack of club interest meant, and still means, that most fans have, I reckon, no clue that the book even exists.

As I've said before, it amazes me that any book that's not about teenage vampires or written by a Fox News racist can get published these days given how little effort is put into marketing them.

I tried to talk it up. My friend in Minnesota, who remembers going to the Kicks, has read it. I bought four copies. I plan to give one to my nephew eventually, but I thought that he'd be upset by how the old Rowdies kinda shit on the current Rowdies, which he supports.